Game of Chickens

Curses are coming.

The Plot To This Idiocy

Mandretch the Malevolent is a vile, blackened soul who would be renowned for cruelty and cold intelligence if he were careless enough to let the general populace retain much memory of his existence. He yearns for power and immortality, but sees the trapping of lichdom as tiring and limited. He decided to pursue a different flavor of longevity by creating an extension to the Astral Plane (where time has no meaning) on the inside of his skin and encase his innards within one of the floating corpses of a dead power. The planning, experimentation, component gathering, and planar travel necessary to achieve the possibility of success took decades. During this process, he extended his life by any means necessary, no matter how heinous. He sought knowledge across Baator, scoured the layers of the Abyss, traversed the cubes of Acheron, and had to escape Carceri just to obtain the pestle to grind his ingredients. Finally, obtaining the last and most powerful component, which was extremely time sensitive to use before it degraded, Mandretch settled on a little cottage in a forgotten village, and started his preparations. His completion of achieving ultimate power was at hand!

Chickens is a too-tall Tinker Gnome from the village of Tinkerhaven, a village that moved above ground when coal deposits were discovered right under their noses in their underground home. Chicken’s life quest is to completely, thoroughly understand how to brew the perfect alcohol. While in a remote village traveling and researching, he was sidetracked with trying to build a steam powered shoehorn. On its first use, it violently exploded, and scorching parts pierced the walls and window of a nearby cottage. A scream of rage and pain was heard within. Within moments, Chickens was frozen in place, and levitated in through the broken window, where he heard the following words seethingly spoken.

“Your life shall be filled with uncontrollable chaos. Never shall you remain welcome or find solace again. You will sorrow all your days.” Then the casting began.

Chickens the Tinker Gnome now has a curse where every waking hour, on the hour, the magical weave itself flows through him and bursts forth (due to deific intervention, this is now once per day). Sometimes he can control the target. If not, the target will be whatever will cause him the most harm at the time, be it mental, emotional, or physical. Results are sometimes amusing, sometimes irritating, sometimes unnoticeable, and sometimes terrible. He has disintegrated his only friend Lobsters the donkey, razed lands, caused the death of his companions, turned rivers to glass, ripped apart the familial relationships of nearby wildlife, lost his nose, changed ecosystems, drooled ice, made friends and enemies in people he has never met, and left thousands of people suffering random curses and windfalls. He must travel from place to place, and can never rest, lest he see the innocent suffer. Only his desire for revenge, an emotion typically unknown by the tinkerers, keeps him moving forward against odds that even the most powerful would hesitate to face.

Can he and his band of ragged companions survive the curse to confront Mandretch?